(ASP1) Syncronization and Duplicate Folders for Older Mail Clients

This email is a bit unique because SmarterMail upgrades are usually transparent to system administrators and end users alike. However, in releasing SmarterMail 14.x, we released support for Outlook 2016.

In order to accommodate this latest release from Microsoft, we had to modify the way SmarterMail 14.x handles IMAP mailboxes. This change can impact the mail services for email accounts using older versions of Microsoft Outlook.

A Quick Overview of the Issue

With Outlook 2016, Microsoft is requiring that UIDs for IMAP folders be greater than “0”. Put simply, any time an IMAP folder is created, a Unique Identifier (UID) is added to the folder. That way, when a folder is deleted and a new one with the same name is created, IMAP clients know to re-sync that folder.

Lessening the Impact of the Changes

To lessen the potential impact to each email account, the most recent minor release of SmarterMail segments the UID change so that the re-sync of messages runs on only 10 email accounts per hour. These email accounts are processed in alphabetical order by domain and user. Mail Server Administrators can check the status of a server’s re-sync by reviewing the <uidVvFixProgress> field in the mailConfig.xml file. This will show the last email account that was updated. Once the process is complete, this field will be set to None.

Managing the Synchronization

Further, System Administrators can manage the speed at which email accounts are processed. They simply need to turn off the SmarterMail service and add the following line to the mailConfig.xml file, within the <MailConfig> section, then restart the SmarterMail service:

<maxUidVvFixesPerHour>XX</maxUidVvFixesPerHour>

In the example, “XX” indicates the number of email accounts to process per hour. NOTE: Be careful when increasing the default value as increasing the number of accounts per hour can impact resource utilization while those accounts are processing.

Outlook Profiles

Finally, there have been a few reports that duplicate folders have been seen within Outlook when the re-sync runs for a mailbox. To solve that issue, Outlook users can delete and then recreate their Outlook profiles. However, users will have to recreate any custom calendar views and any other customizations if they delete and recreate their Outlook profiles.

Understand that this is a ONE TIME CHANGE, so after a mailbox re-syncs, no further action is required. However, please also understand that this change was necessary to accommodate the use of Microsoft Outlook 2016.